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1. Taking questions
-
President Obama hosted his final press conference of the year today.
[Vox / Matt Yglesias]
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The biggest news of the conference was Obama chastising Sony for pulling The Interview.
[Vox / Tim Lee]
-
Obama: "We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States."
-
Sony exec Michael Lynton: Obama's "mistaken."
[CNN / Frank Pallotta]
-
Lynton also insisted Sony is serious about releasing The Interview — just not on Christmas.
-
Obama also promised retaliation for North Korea's hacking of Sony, but realistically, there's not a whole lot he can do.
[Vox / Zack Beauchamp]
-
It's possible — likely, even — the hack wasn't mainly motivated by The Interview.
[Vox / Max Fisher]
-
It was certainly the most entertaining press engagement Obama has had in a long time.
[Washington Post / Chris Cillizza]
-
One notable aspect of it: all eight reporters Obama called on were women.
[Vox / Kelsey McKinney]
2. Misc. - policy and world
-
Pakistan has responded to the Peshawar school massacre with strikes that have killed 62 militants, or so it claims.
[NYT / Ismail Khan]
-
Officials claim the US has killed about 1,000 ISIS fighters and a number of senior officials in air strikes.
[The Guardian / Julian Borger]
-
ISIS fighters' morale is apparently collapsing, with 400 reportedly arrested for failing to report for duty.
[FT / Erika Solomon]
-
An independent review says the Secret Service needs more staff with more training, and the White House needs a taller fence.
[Yahoo! / Olivier Knox]
-
The Fed's delaying the Volcker rule, one of the most important protections in Dodd-Frank.
[New Republic / David Dayen]
3. Misc. - other
-
Papers at a conference were sent through peer review twice as an experiment. Most papers that were accepted by one set of reviewers were rejected by the other set.
[Marginal Revolution / Tyler Cowen]
-
A harrowing, detailed account of the September disappearance of 43 Mexican college students in Iguala.
[California Sunday Magazine / John Gibler]
-
Serial reporter Sarah Koenig's phone interviews with Adnan Syed could have easily cost $2,500 due to the ridiculous price of prison phone calls.
[Businessweek / Joshua Brustein]
-
The potential downsides of compassion.
[The Critique / Roger Crisp]
-
Jay-Z and Beyoncé lost a bidding war for a Beverly Hills mansion to … the guy who wrote Minecraft.
[The Verge / Ross Miller]
-
The secret to making a song sound Christmas-y: a minor subdominant chord with an added 6th.
[Slate / Adam Ragusea]
4. Verbatim
-
"I was just threatened with eternal damnation over how someone’s website might come up in a Google search."
[The Kernel / Aaron Sankin]
-
"A recent landmark study … attributes one-fifth of America’s productivity and wage gains over the past 50 years to the improved allocation of talent."
[Washington Post / Jim Tankersley]
-
"Sweden’s liberal freedom-of-information laws offer easy access to personal information about nearly anyone, including people’s personal identity numbers, their addresses, even their taxable income."
[Technology Review / Adrian Chen]
-
"Unlike their US colleagues, UK police no longer push for confessions, which they consider inherently unreliable."
[Aeon / Douglass Starr]
-
"[Current Democratic Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon's] position on school desegregation was more of a Southern Democrat, and it came pretty close to massive resistance."
[William Freivogel to ProPublica / Nikole Hannah-Jones]
-
"Uncertainty is the subtlest form of tyranny."
[Slate / Stephen Tobolowsky]
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- Vox Sentences: On Iran, a resolute House
- The most entertaining Obama press conference in years
- Hollywood reels from The Interview's cancellation
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